Brazil supports fair use

BRAZIL HAS BUCKED an unfortunate trend amongst regulators and is allowing fair use of copyrighted material, so long as it is not a copyright violation.

Brazil is one of many countries that has to implement rules on the use of digital rights management (DRM) technology. However, perhaps unusually, it has chosen to implement DRM rules in favour of both sides of the equation.

According to reports, and a Google translate version of some Brazillian documents, the law can come down on anyone that commits a copyright crime, such as illegally breaking copyright protection and sharing media, and any firm that uses unfair copyright protection.

The law change was discussed on Micheal Geist's blog at the end of last week, where Geist, who is a Canadian law professor, said that it "Establishes equivalent penalties for hindering or preventing the users from exercising their fair dealing rights. In other words, the Brazilian proposals recognise what the Supreme Court of Canada stated several years ago - over-protection is just as harmful as under-protection."

So, Plan A is that we all move to Brazil. But if that fails and some other things happen, we might consider Canada instead. µ